Overview
As one of my first large-scale initiatives on the design team at Trust & Will, I worked to re-imagine our core application layout, navigation, and functionality to pave the way for expanding our platform in the future. This was a part of a company-wide effort to move our product into its "phase 2" and a notable point in the company's history. The effort spanned ~12 months and involved collaboration with essentially every department at our company of 50 people.
Problem statement
A long-standing problem we had identified in user interviews was that many of our members did not know where they were in the process or what to do next, and found it hard to regain their bearings when coming back to the product after some time away. The need for clear progress indicators and a general lack of "grounding" elements in our product was leading to uncertainty and confusion. Additionally, we had exciting ideas on our roadmap that had yet to find their own natural place within our information architecture and ui structure, so a reevaluation of our navigation and functionality made sense.
Process
Though overall a somewhat “blue sky” effort, we wanted to ensure this work built upon what we already knew resonated with our customers. Our question-and-answer structure for document creation was working well, but the needed to be reused. We set out to create a new environment for our existing patterns to more comfortable live and grow.
After conducting fresh competitor analysis and putting together a thorough inventory of existing patterns and structures present in similar industries and applications, we worked through low fidelity concepts to test viability of navigation structures with existing customers and internal employees. We found that the best fit for our current needs (and future growth) was a left nav style layout with a universal header, breadcrumbs, and a dedicated home page. This navigation element helped ground the user by providing depth and dependability, while providing a more clear answer to the question "where am I?"
Once we had our structure together, we worked on designing out a brand new Home page that could provide users with a clear and concise overview of their progress, what to do next, and why. Previously Trust & Will only had a section-by-section overview of what had been completed, but no quick way to gauge progress or review answers that had been previously input. We moved this overview of the user inputs to its own dedicated page where all data became visible together, rather than only being accessible by revisiting the question and answer flow. This new use of progressive disclosure allowed us to ensure we gave the user enough information to act without being completely overloaded, and gave more clear signals to all users where they could find the information or action they were looking for.
Results
This type of foundational design work is sometimes hard to quantify, given the number of moving parts and scope of the reach. I can say that we saw a significant decrease in the number of questions we were fielding regarding progress and completion status, a problem that had previously existed the entire tenure of the company's lifespan. The new navigation and information architecture also paved the way for all of the new features we've built since this project, and has enabled the growth of our platform and recurring revenue to more than double since the launch of our new member experience.
